[The Miner's Pale Children: A Book of Prose and The Carrier of Ladders: A Book of Poems] invoke by their subtitles the false distinction between prose and poetry: the real distinction is between prose and verse, since both are books of poems, with distinct resemblances and a few differences…. The prose pieces come with their dramatic title, The Miner's Pale Children, to preclude our criticism: if we ask why they are not more robust, they answer by a single eloquent finger pointing to sunless caverns where they were born: peaked and huge-eyed, like wizened English workhouse children, they stand in speechless reproach in the schoolyard, rebuking by their mere subterranean etiolation the boisterous ruddiness of the terrestrial.

The trouble with the analogy is that nobody tells us why the father of these pieces hasn't let them play in the sunshine more. There is maybe even a complacency in their fragility, as if to say that they are more sensitive than those huge galumphing children with their tans. I do not know for sure whether one has the right to reproach a poet for his subject, but Merwin has been maintaining his starved and mute stance so long that one has a relentless social-worker urge to ask him to eat something, anything, to cure his anemia.

And then, relenting in face of a single poem, singly perceived, and not part of the litany of hunger, one grants Merwin his talent for the desolate and the dismembered. He is a voice singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells with the toneless cry of The Waste Land. He often seems a lesser Eliot, taking one of Eliot's tonalities to its logical conclusion, a hollow man finding his hollow divinities…. (pp. 233-34)

There are tenuous allegories of wish and incomprehension [in the prose pieces]: a "June couple" imagine the "little place beside the water" that they would like to own, each confecting a private vision (his has tan imitation-brick shingles, with a screen porch, while hers is "a low stone building, one big dormer in its thatch roof"), and while each says raptly in separate chorus "Mine," the separation yawns invisibly between them, and the piece ends.

There are parental neglects and reparations…. Other stories, more dreamlike, with the attendant disadvantages, revolve around incomprehensible journeys, uninhabited ports, fragmented bodies, chilling rites of passage, inexplicable ordeals, and surreal tasks (like "unchopping a tree"—a minute set of directions on how to put a chopped-up tree back together again).

There are also painstaking and self-flagellating dissections of memory, grief, fear, and personality…. (p. 234)

Merwin's abstraction cloaks the human cause of these poems, but desolation and abandonment shading into terror are more common than any other feeling. On the other hand, one feels that these poems were written not so much from sentiments requiring expression as from obsessive counters demanding manipulation. These counters are a set of words, found here and in Merwin's earlier volumes, that act for him as a set of talismans: endlessly he pushes them around into different spatial arrangements, festoons them with different decorations, but they are almost always there, central, demanding, repetitive, exacting.

The Merwin dictionary has nouns of ill-omen (pain, grief, fear, pallor, extinction), obsessive objects (gloves, hands, clocks, watches, bandages, shrouds, eyes), exhausted adjectives (hollow, empty, faint, deaf, blind, blank, frozen, lost, broken, hungry, dead), and constellations of negation (speechless, colorless, nameless, windless, unlighted, unseen, unmoved, unborn). Is it ill-will in a reader to want to force-feed these pale children till they, when cut, will bleed? Even Merwin would seem to want a change: he prays,

          Send me out into another life
          Lord because this one is growing faint
          I do not think it goes all the way.

There are poems when a new life may seem to be beginning, and some of these are very beautiful, especially "Snowfall."… (p. 235)

In his elusive pallors, Merwin sometimes comes near a flawless balance of cadence and meaning. Some of his poems of deprivation and winter share a place in "the prehistory of the mind" with the February poems of Wallace Stevens, but they lack Stevens' obdurate persistence in the natural—his squirrels, his forsythia, his scrawny bird cry. On the other hand, Merwin has not subscribed to the falser poetic consolations of Eliot: he inhabits a dimmer world than either Eliot or Stevens, but there is a faint cast of sentimentality over his poems that persuades the reader that he could, by taking thought, add a cubit to his stature and raise sturdier offspring. (p. 236)